Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP)
Outcome
Barbara Harris, Executive Director of CCASP, pleaded guilty on February 27, 2025 to wire fraud for a decade-long scheme to defraud government grant programs of $1.8 million by submitting false grant applications with inflated expenses and fictitious subcontractors, and a separate AmeriCorps VISTA fraud scheme from 2021–2023.
Details
Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP) — Grant Fraud and False Subcontractor Reporting, Chicago (2012–2023)
Outcome: Barbara Harris, Executive Director of CCASP, pleaded guilty on February 27, 2025 to one count of wire fraud before U.S. District Judge Andrea R. Wood in the Northern District of Illinois, for orchestrating a $1.8 million fraud scheme against government grant programs spanning more than a decade, including a separate AmeriCorps VISTA fraud from 2021 to 2023. Sentencing was set for July 11, 2025.
The Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP) was a Chicago-area nonprofit that received government grants and other funds to provide after-school programs to schools in the Chicago area. From 2012 to 2017, Barbara Harris — serving as Executive Director — schemed with co-defendant Tony Bell, another CCASP executive, to submit grant applications that systematically overstated the organization's projected annual expenses and falsely claimed that five named subcontractors would provide services to CCASP.
In reality, the listed subcontractors provided no actual services to CCASP. The inflated budgets and fictional subcontractors served to obtain larger grant allocations than CCASP's actual activities would have justified, and the gap between claimed and actual expenditures allowed Harris and Bell to divert funds from the grant programs. The total loss to the grant programs during the CCASP scheme was approximately $1.8 million.
Harris continued her fraudulent conduct well beyond the CCASP scheme. From 2021 to 2023, while serving as Co-Executive Director of a different organization, South Suburban Community Services, she participated in a separate fraud involving the federally funded AmeriCorps VISTA program. Harris submitted grant applications falsely representing that AmeriCorps VISTA members would work on new programs — a requirement for VISTA program eligibility — when she knew the members would actually be used to support already-funded programs that did not qualify. This resulted in a fraudulent loss of $98,699 to the VISTA program.
The wire fraud guilty plea covered both schemes. The case illustrates a common pattern in community development nonprofit fraud: the executive who controls grant reporting can exploit the gap between what grant applications promise and what actually happens on the ground, particularly when funders lack systematic post-award monitoring controls.
Primary Source: DOJ NDIL — Former CCASP Executive Pleads Guilty in $1.8 Million Fraud Scheme
How Crucible Prevents This
A grant application review workflow requiring independent verification of subcontractor engagement and service delivery documentation would have identified that the five listed subcontractors were providing no actual services. Budget reconciliation controls cross-referencing grant expenditures against actual invoices and deliverables would have flagged the inflated projected expenses. The AmeriCorps VISTA fraud — falsely representing that VISTA members would work on new programs — would have been caught by a program activity tracking system requiring documented evidence of new versus existing program activities tied to each VISTA member's work plan.
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